Many of the assumptions made by Heisenberg in his revolutionary 1925 paper could be justified in some form or another (although they are not by any means obvious), like for example his matrix multiplication rule which can be motivated by the Ritz combination principle, but one thing which I find very hard to accept is his assumption on the time evolution of his observables: $X_{mn} e^{2\pi i\nu_{nm}t}$. It seems very odd to me that one should formulate a dynamical theory by postulating a specific form for time evolution of the quantities of interest. Even more strange, is the fact that Born and Jordan also assumed this type of time dependence for the general theory of matrix mechanics for all types of quantum mechanical systems. So my question is, is there some way to make the above assumption less mysterious? Perhaps there was some direct experimental evidence (on atomic spectra) suggesting this particular type of time evolution?
Asked
Active
Viewed 151 times
